


For It Shows Me the Stars

by zarabithia



Category: Batman Begins (2005)
Genre: Gen, Psychological Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-12
Updated: 2007-12-12
Packaged: 2018-01-25 05:24:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1633808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zarabithia/pseuds/zarabithia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Truth serum has a way of making Bruce remember both sides of his life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	For It Shows Me the Stars

**Author's Note:**

> Written for verocious

 

 

_"I will love the light for it shows me the way. Yet I will endure the darkness for it shows me the stars." ~ Og Mandino_

 

 

When Bruce was fifteen, a well-meaning woman in her fifties who had been given the unenviable task of being his English tutor had first tried to introduce him to the concept of epiphanies. They had, even at that young of an age, seemed like an utterly ridiculous notion, and Bruce wondered what kind of ridiculous fools had the luxury to divide their lives into the kind of bland little existences marked by frilly exclamation pointed moments, as though the newfound knowledge wasn't something that had always been there, and merely overlooked until the self-absorbed individual stopped ambling long enough to examine the evidence around them.

 

On the other hand, Bruce did believe in _milestones_. They differed from epiphanies, both because they were unlikely to be giggled breathily into his ear at one of his parties by one of the many women who would never be Rachel Dawes, and because they denoted _action,_ an actual event which significantly altered the course of one's life. Unlike their trivial cousin, epiphany, milestones didn't purport to enter one's life by way of confetti and fireworks.

 

Guns tended generally to be less obnoxiously loud than your average fireworks display, and so Bruce was more inclined to believe in their existence.

 

Also unlike their detestable cousin, milestones made decent companions to review while being tied up and interrogated by a distant and angry cousin of Carmine Falcone. Bruce knew that the trip down memory lane was a futile waste of energy, that he should instead focus his efforts on trying to get free...

 

But they had injected him with something, some kind of drug... a hallucinogen, perhaps, that made the blue flowers found at the base of China's mountaintops as mild as cough syrup in comparison. What exactly it was, Bruce didn't quite know, but he did know that it made the bruises more painful, the memories more clear, and the knives more sharp.

 

He'd rather not remember, but the alternative was sharing intimate parts of himself with the man asking prying questions between attempts to carve persuasion into Bruce's flesh. Too many people depended on him to be strong, and so he fought against the whispers of compliance the drug had caused, and focused on the pool of his own blood, staring mockingly up at the floor of the entirely too cold abandoned warehouse, through the one eye that was not swollen shut. The lights from the warehouse reflected off the pool, making the blood seem obscenely bright.

 

Blood wasn't supposed to shine that way; every example Bruce could remember had pooled around the victim's body darkly, serving as an appropriately grim reminder of the crime that had been committed.

 

Pearls ...they were supposed to shine. They were supposed to be bright, like the sun streaking down into the bat cove, and like the silver of his father's stethoscope taking care of him when Bruce simply should have been stronger. Braver. When he should have gotten back up quicker after the fall, before life had a chance to kick him while he was down.

 

If he had gotten up, they would have stayed in the theatre, Bruce thought, and the pearls could have continued to shine brightly around his mother's neck, where they belonged, and not in the blood soaked grime of an alleyway.

 

That had been his first milestone, the first time his life had taken an turn that had forever altered the path he'd been on. Bruce remembered what he had thought on that dark and bitterly cold night, and with every bone in his body crying out in rage, anger, sadness, and the desire to make the man pay, Bruce hadn't had any time for any ridiculous epiphanies.

 

The large, angry cousin was still there, despite Bruce's best efforts to push all thoughts of him away. Apparently, the Falcone family shared the annoying trait of needing attention at any given second, and the gnarled, impatient hand that struck Bruce's jaw still wanted confessions that Bruce wasn't willing to give....

 

Alfred's hands were gnarled, and had been for as long as Bruce had known him. Bruce had sat for hours at the table in the library watching those wrinkled hands, whose strength had been surpassed only by Bruce's father, polishing the grandfather clock. So much of his childhood had been spent that way, surrounded by the precious books that Alfred had deemed so important.

 

Alfred had always hoped that the lessons in those books would steer him back onto the right path, the path that he'd been on before he'd watched his parents fall. While Bruce loved Alfred dearly, he could never understand why the old man couldn't realize that in those early years, as the pain had festered and boiled beneath the surface, that it was only the sound of Alfred's calming voice and steady hands that been able to sooth the rage he'd felt.

 

Bruce had the sudden, hysterical urge to tell the angry cousin just how brightly that clock in his library had shown when Alfred was done polishing it.

 

Too many people depended on him, and could be hurt by that, Bruce vaguely realized. There couldn't be any spilling...no matter how much the knots in the angry cousin's hands scratched against his face as the man attached to them stopped punching Bruce long enough to attempt to shake a confession out of him.

 

It only succeeded in shaking the memory of Alfred away. The coarseness of the touch was too harsh to be associated with the man who had spent the better part of his childhood trying to give back some small part of what Joe Chill had taken away. Instead, it reminded him of the hands belonging to the man he'd first met in a room much darker, much smaller than the tiny warehouse.

 

Bruce liked to think now that he could have escaped that prison cell, had he put any effort into doing so. Though given his current useless status, maybe he couldn't have.

 

Not that he'd put any effort into escaping, of course. He'd still been on a foolish, idealistic mission to "discover" the inner workings of the criminal mind. Ducard...Ra's had shown up and promised to teach him more about that than his pathetic solo attempts could, and from the cell where Bruce had sat in his tattered clothing, spending his days watching the few stray beams of sunshine streak through his window cell and shine through the dust particles clouding the air, it had seemed like a very good deal.

 

To Ra's credit, he hadn't been lying. The nights Bruce had spent between his teacher and sheets opulent even by Wayne Manor standards had been...

 

_Foolish._

 

Foolish, yes, but also an undeniable milestone. Somewhere between the hasty thrusts and the kisses ripe with lies, Bruce had gained a purpose that had stayed with him long after leaving the bright, golden-lined palace. Prior to meeting Ra's, Bruce had wandered aimlessly, and without Ra's, and all the implicit _foolishness_ , there might never have been a Batman.

 

Bruce thought that perhaps he should have thanked Ra's for that, before letting him die.

 

But then, most of Bruce's milestones were steeped in regret.

 

The angry cousin was back.

 

Falcone was taunting him now, with the promise of food, a taunt which his accomplice (Bruce thought he should remember an accomplice, should remember someone else having been there, but his memory of that was foggier than the others were tonight) justifiably believed shouldn't be necessary with the serum.

 

The prisoner was holding out, Falcone told his accomplice, and Bruce gave a dry little laugh at the idea, because it didn't feel like he was doing very good at holding out at all. In fact, as far as he could tell, he was getting dangerously close to spilling his guts all over both perps, both literally and metaphorically.

 

It had been a long time since he'd thrown up in the Bat suit. Not since he'd come across his first dead body. The first, but certainly not the last, person that had died under Batman's watch.

 

His struggled laugh that he gave to the angry cousin only served to make his captors more angry, and the stale taste on his tongue and in the back of his throat reminded him of the kind of nausea he had felt, all those years ago. He'd forced himself to stand there and stare at the body until every ounce of nausea he'd felt in the pit of his stomach ceased to bother him.

 

There hadn't been any pearls that night, but the blood had still pooled around the body just as darkly as it had nearly twenty years before. The only brightness had come from the moonlight reflecting off of the victim's shirt buttons, torn hastily by the jagged edge of the knife that had taken his life.

 

Bruce figured if he had gotten over his nausea on that night, he could do so again. There would be no vomit to appease Falcone and the twit at his side, no sign of weakness, no letting them know that they had won.

 

He swallowed the bile down, relishing the bitterness almost as much as the frustration on Falcone's face.

 

The angry cousin wasn't very pleased with either act, and let Bruce know this with repeated blows to the face, as though there was any reason that Bruce would still have feeling left in his face after hours worth of interrogation. In fact, Bruce was pretty certain that whatever drug they injected him with was working to numb his muscles.

 

He chose not to share that particular tidbit with the angry cousin.

 

It was a tempting proposition, though, so instead, Bruce focused on just how badly the angry cousin smelled.

 

Bruce supposed the other man wasn't aware of how badly he stunk. The stench was the same kind that permeated every giggling socialite bimbo that had ever been a guest at the parties Bruce was forced to throw to maintain his cover. Cologne and perfume never smelled pleasant when piled that heavily on, not even when it cost hundreds of dollars, and Bruce wondered why no one ever pulled the fools aside and told them how badly they stunk.

 

Alfred would have told him.

 

Then, possibly, maybe the angry cousin's friends didn't have any desire to get tied to a chair and beaten.

 

As for Bruce, he took the time being tied to the chair to remember much more pleasant smells. Rachel...Rachel had always smelled good, even when she was breaking his heart. On the way back from Chill being shot, her smell - a combination of citrus and vanilla that came from body bath and shampoo, not overly-priced perfume - had permeated the small car so strongly that Bruce hadn't been able to shake it. Not even as he'd walked over the bridge and tossed the gun into the bright, sparkling water below.

 

She'd had the same scent years later, when she'd come to him amidst the ruins of Wayne Manor, and bade him goodbye. The sun had been obnoxiously bright that day, reflecting off the crisp whiteness of her blouse in a way that screamed how incompatible they had grown - how incompatible Bruce had made them.

 

Another milestone. Batman needed to be alone. No matter what foolish boy scouts that smelled like sunshine and hay in their bright, primary colored spandex claimed to the contrary as they stood towering above him.

 

The Justice League was _too_ bright, with a world of color and flash, and Batman didn't belong there. He knew that, and dearly wished they'd figure that out too.

 

Of course, he wouldn't have rejected a little help from one of his so-called teammates right about now.

 

The angry cousin pointed a gun to his chest. He wanted to see if Kevlar could withstand a direct blast to the chest, or so he told his accomplice.

 

The room suddenly seemed a lot less dark to Bruce as he refocused his attention from the pool of blood at his feet to he gun at his chest. The metal of the gun was obscenely bright in the dark warehouse. It was bright in the same way as Harvey's coin and Joker's costume, with the same jeering laughter that accompanied both men's bouts of insanity.

 

There had been a lot of laughter at the Manor lately. Since the night the helpless billionaire had first knelt down beside his acrobat in a circus tent full of stunned onlookers trying their best to scurry out of the tent, Dick had been a consistent bright spot in an otherwise dark life.

 

Alfred would take care of Dick after he was gone, Bruce was certain. As the explosions popped in his ears and he lost consciousness, Bruce remembered sundaes and polished grandfather clocks, wrapped in gnarled but tender hands and the brilliant blue eyes of his boy, and he was content.

 

He woke up slowly, his mind still fuzzy. His ears recognized the familiar sounds and helped to place his surroundings far more quickly than his still faulty vision was capable of.

 

"He's coming to, Alfred."

 

"In that case, Master Richard, it appears we owe yet another miracle to Lucius."

 

"Hey, what's one more? ... You suppose he's keeping score?"

 

"For our sake, let us hope not."

 

When Bruce was finally able to make his eyes cooperate, he saw the two people whom he consistently trusted his life with peering down at him. His back was sore enough to protest no matter where he might have been laid, but the coolness against his palms indicated that he had been deposited on one of the examination tables.

 

He hadn't had a decent examination table back when Rachel had needed one, Bruce vaguely recalled. It was a moment of ludicrous sentimentality that he blamed squarely on whatever drugs were still in his system.

 

"What did they give me?" he demanded. His voice was harsher than he intended, and Bruce winced at the scratching in his throat as he tried to talk.

 

Robin answered while Alfred was still trying to force liquids down Bruce's throat. "Truth serum," he said, shifting to bounce on his other foot.

 

Bruce pushed the water away in irritation, causing some of it to splash onto his chest. "Did I -" he started to ask, remembering clearly how easily his mind had wanted to spill every detail of his life to the angry cousin. If he'd compromised any identities....

 

"No," Dick said immediately. "Creeps did us a favor by recording your torture, and you didn't spill a word. Well, you kept talking about things being bright and shiny..but nothing they could use." Robin shifted his weight back to the other foot. "You were awesome!"

 

He sounded too proud, too captivated by Bruce's exploits for Bruce's liking.

 

"Someday I will tell you about all the times I wasn't," Bruce promised.

 

"Perhaps some sleep is in order first, Master Wayne," Alfred chided, and those gnarled hands briefly touched Bruce's shoulder, in a gesture that urged him to lie down and rest.

 

Just this once, Bruce agreed. "Thanks for rescuing me," he told Dick. "You did a good job, and I'm proud of you."

 

Dick hopped on both feet in reply, his happiness showing in his actions.

 

Before Bruce closed his eyes, he caught a glimpse of the retreating gold of Dick's cape and the white in Alfred's hair. The comfort he received in their brightness against the otherwise dark cave lulled him back into a dreamless sleep.

 


End file.
